I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.
Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'
We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.
I have always been fascinated by the supernatural elements in stories, whether fairy tales, myths, film or literature.
In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.
I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
People have different views of how you deal with different issues in literature, and, frankly, long may it last that there is a range of views.
You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.
What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.
I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.
The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.
